Back from the grave

I thought long and hard, and decided to take a break from art for a little while. It was extremely frustrating for me to continue to spend time and resources on something that was no longer bringing me any sort of enjoyment. Just recently, however, I decided to get back into digital painting as a therapeutic exercise, and it has worked wonders for me. I'm slowly regaining my former sense of enjoyment from art, and I intend to continue at it to see where it takes me, although I will probably never pursue it as a career as I originally intended to.

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Good to see you post allot of work in a short amount of time. Keep up that work ethic.

First thing I would advice you to check out is figure construction. Using simple large shapes to construct your pose and adding more detail on top of that. Check out Hampton's "Figure drawing - Design and invention" first (the best book I found on the subject). After that you could check out Loomis, Bridgeman etc (also extremely good, but Hampton has was a little clearer to me).

Examples of the process (found this in a tutorial by Tracy J Butler):

Photo from Hampton's book (not made by me):

Also, you might want to work in value first instead of throwing in color already. Nothing wrong with color ofcourse, but working in black and white will probably help you understand 3D form faster. After which you can throw color in the mix easier.

I would also like to see some drawings from live. Try to use the construction methods on things that you see before you.

Thanks to the advice of /ic/, I realized I was going about this digital painting in completely the wrong way and went back to studying basic forms. Drew these Loomis mannequins in about an hour, give or take.

It's good you're doing a study. Keep doing them. Basics are good, though I think your real weakness at the moment is painting, with colour and value. Try doing some value studies -- find a screencap of a TV show you like, desaturate it, paint it. It'll help you out there.

It's a good thing you posted your progress with that last one, because you went about it the wrong way. Work from general to specific. You should have all of your forms in place BEFORE you go about the details.